The English sparrow has multiplied with characteristic industry in Chicago, but further west I lost it. I saw none between Omaha and Salt Lake City. So the sparrow line, I take it, must be drawn for the present somewhere west of Clinton. I do not think it has crossed the Mississippi yet from the east. But it is steadily advancing its frontiers--this aggressive fowl--from both sea-boards, and just as it has pushed itself forward from the Atlantic into Illinois, so from the Pacific it has got already as far as Nevada. The tyranny of the sparrow is the price men pay for civilization. Only savages are exempt. Here in America, they have developed into a multitudinous evil, dispossessing with a high hand the children of the soil, thrusting their Saxon assumption of superiority upon the native feathered flock of grove and garden, and driving them from their birthright. They have no respect for authorities, and entertain no awe even for the Irish aldermen of New York. In Australia it is the same. Imported as a treasure, they have presumed upon the sentiment of exiled Englishmen until they have become a veritable calamity. So they have been publicly proclaimed as "vermin," and a price set upon their heads "per hundred." Indeed, legislatures threaten to stand or fall upon the sparrow question. Here in America, men and women began by putting nesting-boxes for the birds in the trees and at corners of houses; I am much mistaken if before long they do not end by putting up ladders against the trees to help the cats to get up to catch the sparrows.